Nalates Urriah

Tom's has a new review of CPU's out... with links to benchmarks. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-cpus,3986.html AMD vs Intel history is long. They typically exchange the leading position as the 'best gaming cpu' once or twice a year.

Yes, it would be REALLY nice to have folders and subfolders for organizing Outfits. As it is now I group my outfits in a flat list. I name them to sort into sections of the list. For an at the top-of-list starter outfit I use: !!Nude Slink GA.EG. For dresses: !Dress Formal [color and other info]. @Ansariel Hiller Is there a JIRA for such a feature, outfit organizing folders?

I doubt you can find a BEST viewer. There will be a viewer you like best. The default/original Linden is the cutting edge for tech and the simplest to learn. But, it has fewer features than most third party viewers. Firestorm is the most popular viewer. It is also the most feature rich viewer. There is WAY more to learn when using this viewer, but the learning is optional. The Firestorm (FS) team provides in-world classes about the viewer. I think it is a toss up as to whether the Linden or Firestorm viewer is the most stable, crashes least. This is the in-world builder's viewer of choice. It was and for many still is the photographer's viewer of choice. Black Dragon has a non-standard user interface and it awkward to learn compared to other third-party viewers. But it has the best image render. This now the viewer of choice for many of SL's photographers. I think in a large part because it has a wonderful Poser (lets you move the important bones in your avatar). It is also customized for making machinima. I don't know that it is the machinima-ist's viewer of choice but I suspect so. Cool VL Viewer is made for low-end computers but it is awesome on high end machines. It uses the old-old V1 user interface which makes it hard for those new to SL to learn. This is probably the most crash free viewer out there. Singularity is very similar to Cool VL Viewer. I find it confusing to try and figure out which version one should be running. It is a philosophy thing among the developers that makes it confusing. This the way popular viewer among those that have low-end computers. There is an active user-to-user in-world support group. Restrained Love Viewer (RLV) is a viewer that can be controlled by in-world scripts. While the reputation is this is a viewer for the BDSM crowd that is an over simplification. The Linden viewer primarily uses Experiences to gain somewhat similar capability. RLV offers more features and abilities than SL's Experiences. Alchemy and Kokua viewers are out of date and not well supported, if at all.

Are you still having this problem? This type of question is best asked, but not mandatory to, in the Answers section of this forum.

Understandable. I still use appliers for my makeup. I chose BOM because I wanted the lower ACI and script weight. Since the Slink update to BOM was free it was an easy choice.

Cleaning up inventory is sort of like New Year's Resolutions... good plans but generally poor execution. That being said, you may want to just put everything in a folder for future sorting. Maybe... Clothes !Unsorted - put all your stuff here until you get it sorted. The ! makes it sort to the top Dress Long Dress Mini Dress Micro Dress Short Dress Sl_t Length Panties Pants etc Shoes 2021 ~Old - The ~ makes it sort to the end. If you don't get around to sorting stuff, at least it is out of the way. New stuff you can buy and put in the right place. I put new stuff in a folder labeled New Stuff (see how original I am at names?). When I actually wear it for the first time I decide where to put it and move it there. Harrison does mostly what I do. You can search this forum, YouTube, and the blogosphere for various ways to sort and arrange inventory. There is lots of 'how to' stuff out there.

Black Dragon (BD) is the top viewer for rendering IMO. It uses a non-standard user interface, which can be annoying and make somethings difficult to find. If you use Firestorm's Phototools you'll REALLY be annoyed with BD. Its Machinima Tools are close but enough different that I really miss FS's tools when in BD. BD's Poser is the BIG attraction for me. In my image above I used Poser to turn my head and focus my eyes on the camera as well as moving my hands outside my body. I had to dig into BD and FS to get better shadows. So read my article Firestorm 6.4.12 Shadows for Photography. FS has most of the settings needed in their Phototools. Not so with Black Dragon. Once either viewer has the settings changed for high quality shadows you can use the EEP/Windlight controls to adjust the shadow intensity and position. I mostly was interested in getting hair to face shadows. They are tedious and time consuming to add in PS. But, the settings changes affect ALL shadows. Learning ow the shadows are controlled allows me to get crisp or fuzzy-diffuse shadows.

Reconsidering career path...

These are viewer shadows in Black Dragon. Added some contrast with PS and cropped. Location is Backdrop City.

I've seen enough of your images that I am starting to recognize your work. Nice images. Thanks for posting.

This is from a series of shots in Backdrop City. I am curious about the place always being so busy. Are they mostly modeling clothes and things? Photographers taking images for fun? Whatever... Hmmm... this looks way better when the forum has a dark background. I use an app named Dark Reader to switch back and forth from lite to dark.

I've been playing with Black Dragon and its poser again. I usually visit places and take shots I see in my wondering. This is one of the few I decided what I wanted to capture and then went and set it up. Black Dragon, Poser, lots of EEP/Windlight tweaks, photo-light attachments, and a little Photoshop.

Nice images. It is pictures like this that make me so wish Black Dragon poses were visible to others.

Making a mistake... sort of. It may be more of an understanding things gotcha. I'll explain what is happening. Your mesh body is an SL Object, a prim. Prims have attributes. When you change the alphas on a mesh body you are changing its attributes. When you take it off or log off those attribute settings are saved to the asset system. Next time the prim is rezzed it is rezzed using the last save attributes. This is why you Outfits with and without legs showing get messed up. The body is always using the last saved attributes. An Outfit is NOT a thing... not a prim. It has no attributes. An outfit is a collection of things. The things have attributes. All things/prims will rez using their last saved attributes. Skell's pointing to the Save Stick is the system devised in the Applier era of bodies. It works pretty well. Most non-BOM mesh bodies have some form of this. There are several other solutions too. I think 2 are common, less so then the Save Stick. The new solution is to use BOM and system alpha layers. The bad thing about that is you would likely need to use a different body. You can probably update your body to BOM for free. Another negative is most BOM bodies do NOT accept Applier stuff. So you may end up with a lots of unusable stuff. Otherwise the BOM bodies are way simpler to wear and save as outfits. Because BOM outfits use system alpha layers they never change. You only mess with alpha once per outfit. The alternative is to use copies of the body for your outfits. For all my outfits where I am wearing pants/jeans/etc I need a body with the legs alpha'd out. With dresses I need for them to show. I have several choices. I bought a body, Slink in my case. When I unpacked it I put the body and all its stuff in a folder name original-copy. That is my backup copy. I made another copy of the body and the parts I wear. That I put in a folder named starter. When I start a new outfit I wear the body from the starter folder and build my outfit. Once I have things as I want, I take the body off. I make a copy of the body I just changed and put it in a folder with a name that tells me what it is, i.e., body-no-legs. I wear that body and then save the outfit. I do this with each outfit where the body needs a special settings. I am saving a copy of the body with the settings I want for use with that outfit. My starter body was changed too and I have two copies the same, for now. Next outfit I will change the starter bosy, change it, and save a copy to wear. The starter is only ever worn for a few minutes and is constantly being changed. Sound like a lot of copies? It is and updating bodies saved that way is a pain. So I have started including the body's HUD as part of the outfit. This way it is WAY easier to update outfits when the body updates. I use one working copy of the body in all outfits. When I wear the outfit the body's HUD loads and I can adjust the alpha to suite the clothes. I'll point out that BOM allows me to wear the alpha layer as an item in the outfit. Once worn I do not have to use a HUD to mess with alpha cuts. I also make any Applier HUD that contributes to the outfit a part of the outfit. When I wear the outfit all the HUDs I need to get it looking right are there.

Another way to say it is, the annual payment covers all Linden fees for the year. You can do other things that will incur a cost. Chic listed a few. None of those costs will be hidden nor a surprise. All those costs will come from your informed choice. You pay and get. There is no get and be billed later. Owning land can incur an ongoing cost. The membership fee covers the first 1024 sq meters of land. You can buy more land and it will incur a monthly cost we call tier. Buying land is not difficult but you won't accidently buy land. It is a multi-step process you will consciously navigate. Noting sneaky.

If you are going to be curious... DO NOT wear a cat avatar.

As odd as it sounds, more and more techs avoid using anti-virus on their computers. They consider it as increasing the virus risk rather than reducing it. Leo Leporte, on his talk radio show on tech recommends using only Microsoft's Defender. If you really feel you MUST have an AV... White list the viewer's install folder in either Program Files for 64-bit and Program Files(x86) for 32-bit and cache folders (C:\Users\[Win_user_ID]\AppData\Local\Firestorm_x64 and C:\Users\[Win_user_ID]\AppData\Roaming\Firestorm_x64). Then disable the AV and install the viewer.

The Linden viewer has changed how they report which server you are using. Unfortunately the naming they use does not provide the information needed to ping the server. However, Firestorm and other third party viewers do. Firestorm reports the server I am in just now as: ec2-18-236-208-124.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com. I suspect the red part will be the same for all SL regions. It is for the two regions I tested it on. Plus the full address can be pinged and the Amazon servers reply. You can't ping Amazon using just the red part. However, there are now more routers along the path that don't reply to TRACERT. So, TRACERT is not as useful as it once was... or maybe it is more accurate to say it is more complicated with IPv6 coming online. PING can be high, 2000 to 5000ms and not break the connection. You won't want to use a connection that is that slow. If the high ping continues for more than 15 or 30 seconds the chances of being dropped WAY increase. If you are also dropping packets and have high ping-time then you are more likely to be dropped and that can happen just a few seconds. The packet loss percent number is a running average. This tends to keep it at zero even when you are losing packets. Open the viewer's HELP->About... scroll down to Packets Lost and you'll see the number lost and received along with a percent. When being disconnected it is usually because your system is loosing packets. The only way to tell if that is the case is to look in the SL log file. But, even that is not definitive as it doesn't tell you when the packets were lost... at start up? Very common. During the session? Also common to lose some throughout the session. If you don't know those numbers you can't know if there was a burst of packet loss just prior to the disconnect. So, whether you 0.4% is good or bad can depend on how long you were connected. A few people are noticing more packet loss. It is hard to know if this is related to Amazon cloud or higher net use numbers from CoVid lockdowns. Because we know the Lab changed over we associate the increase with the change. But that isn't a safe assumption. But it is a hypotheses worth considering. And I consider the problem likely something on your side or your ISP's as if it were on the Amazon or Linden side we would have lots of people complaining. PS: Ping as measured by the viewer is not real PING. It is a hybrid ping that includes packet travel time AND SL server response time. You can be in a region and see 1000 to 3000ms PING and not disconnect because most of the time is lagging server response time caused by a lagging server. In such cases you are more likely to disconnect yourself or teleport away because you can't put up with the lag than to have the server disconnect you. I used to see this a lot in combat regions. As Time Dilation and Server FPS worsen so does the viewer's ping time. But packet loss will kill the connection.

I thought we couldn't post full frontal nudity in this thread!?!

There are a number of groups helping new users. Plus there are lots of places in-world to get training. In the viewer's search use the term 'support' and set it to places. You'll find Firestorm's Support Island. Walking through the island should get you all the basics. There are a number of posts in the forum explaining how to do different things. The ANSWERS section has a lot of information and is searchable. There is the SL Knowledge Base. SL has a huge blogosphere and many of those provide tutorials. Using Google will get you to those articles.

Rowan and I agree. Have a backup of your shape. I think a backup of everything. I tweak my shape from time to time, bigger or smaller breasts, hips, nose, ... I save the adjusted shape using Save As... which saves it as a new shape. I also have older mesh clothes that use standard size mesh, the pre-fitted-mesh stuff, that require I adjust my shape to that of the clothes. So, I have lots of shapes. Writing down all the settings for a shape or the items in an Outfit or Look is way to tedious for me. Shapes can be exported as an XML file (permissions allowing) and using Firestorm those files can be imported as a shape. It is much easier to make a copy of the item using your Inventory Panel. I save the list of items in an outfit or look as an OUTFIT. Your problem probably can be traced to a connection issue. You can have a strong Internet connection and a poor connection to the SL system. See Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection to test the connection to SL. The Internet is not a homogenous uniform connection. Connecting from Missouri to California uses completely different hardware than if one connects from SoCal to Northern California. Often problems are solved by relogging. And it is a good idea to log into a different region. Troubleshooting these problems is easiest if you wear the Ruth default avatar. In the viewer press Ctrl-Alt-Q to reveal or hide the Developer top menu item. Developer->Avatar->Character Tests->Test [Male/Female]. Put your previous outfit on one item at a time. When you find the problem item delete it or set it aside for later follow up testing.

The Lab increased the max-size of the viewer's cache. Now up to 10GB. Recommendations for viewer performance include having as large a cache as possible. Computer search technology has improved. Notice the info line at the top of Google's search results. You'll see something like 'About 3,540,000,000 results (0.70 seconds)'. The viewer is searching through way less data for fewer items. Viewers use an indexed cache. Once upon a time they depended on the Windows/Mac operating system to find files. THAT was slow and clearing cache to keep it small made the viewer faster. Back then file corruption was a problem too. Those were the days when everyone was told to clear their viewer's cache frequently and as a first trouble shooting technique. That is NOT the case now. With error correcting HTTP transfer of SL content file corruption is extremely rare. Along with the indexing the viewer cache can be larger and faster with fewer problems. Now clearing cache is a last resort troubleshooting step. There currently is an RC Viewer with a new caching system. Its cache works better than current viewers' caches. When the cache is cleared everything has to be downloaded. This places a load on the SL system's backend, which creates lag for everyone and especially you.

I realize you are on Linux. I'm not running Linux so you will have to translate. I can't find a setting that would disable only group chats. There are some that may in Debug Settings. Use your browser's FIND feature to search the web page on Chat and later on Group. To avoid brain damage, just make sure these settings are set to the viewer's default setting. There is a button for that in the viewer's Debug Settings panel. Press Ctrl-ALT-D to open or close the top menu's ADVANCED item. Advanced->Show Debug Settings. Look at each of the possible settings to make sure they are set to the default. This is tedious. You could delete the viewer's settings file which forces the viewer to create a new settings file with all settings set to default at the next launch. Much faster but then you have to redo all the personal preferences you previously chose. For trouble shooting, rename the settings file and restart the viewer. If your group chat is fixed... then it is one of the settings that was the problem. If not, delete the new settings file and restore the renamed file. For another try I suggest you copy your conversation logs to a backup folder. Actually everything in C:\Users\[Windows_ID]\AppData\Roaming\Firestorm_x64\[avatar_ID]. In Preferences->Network & Files->Directories (tab) you can see where your chat files are. But, you probably know that. When you are in the folder, look at the file names. Group chat files will be named [something]_(group).txt. Check the dates. This will tell you if the system is recording group chat or the last time it did. Delete the [avatar_ID] folder then create a new folder and give it the same name. I saw you fiddled with the permissions. I just had a L O N G fight with a printer/scanner that would not write scans to a workstation's scan folder. I did everything I know to do and no luck. I called the printer's tech people and they fought it for hours. Finally they just deleted the folder, created a new one, set all the shares and permissions, and that solved problem. So... while this may be a Windows peculiarity forcing the system to redo a folder may be a better idea than trying to redo it manually. If you have PRESETS, copy that "presets" folder back in. Launch the viewer and see if group chat is logging. If so, consider copying all you files back in. But, it is the end of the year. A time in which I zip up all my chat files and archive them. I do this to improve viewer and chat performance. As each group chat is in a separate file, it is unlikely a file corruption problem. But, removing them all will allow you to test whether that is the problem and replacing the folder eliminates any folder settings issues. Next I would consider a clean install. There are a lot of 'how to' posts and videos with various considerations on how and what to do in the process. They only mater if you have been using the viewer for awhile. There are some Linux people around in SL. Search groups and find them. The Lab also has a Linux users email list. Dig through the wiki for it or attend a Linden lead user group meeting and ask. I don't know if it is still active. Been awhile since I followed it.

This performance thing is common. Most games have a few gigabytes of game content which is downloaded with the game. SL has well over 200 terabytes of game content. SL is always downloading content for the region you are in and discarding it for new content when you leave a region and enter a new one. Plus whenever a new person comes into view all their stuff has to download. Most game content is made by professionals. SL content is made by the residents of SL. In 2018 residents took about US$60 million out of the 'game'. Unfortunately most of those content creators are hobby level creators. This means there is little content that is optimized to a professional level. So, SL is slow because of the downloading and dificulty rendering poorly optimized content. To run SL on Ultra requires a very robust computer and even then one is likely to have low frame rates.

Rather than try and explain... I'll quote from the GA.EG note card. So my Jennifer head's [SL Neck] is the 'standard' neck size. I wear a Slink body. The images in the 'Look Today' thread show the fit is perfect using the [SL Neck] version of the head. Stealing one of those previously posted... the image links to the 2048px version of the image. No Photoshop blending on the neck. I'll point out that the bottom row/ring of polygons on the head and the top row/ring on the body are key for getting an apparent skin match. If the polygons depart too much from the 'tilt' of the polygons on the Classic avatar you may still see a seam. It has to do with how the render engine renders light off an angled surface. Deviate too much and it shows.